How Much Is 'The Chase' Adding to Ken Jennings’ Trivia Fortune?

He's already the winningest contestant in game show history, but Ken Jennings hasn't retired just yet. The Jeopardy! legend is also serving as one of the show's guest hosts, but he's also lent his trivia talents to The Chase, a new trivia competition show airing on ABC. Now, some fans are wondering how much Ken and his fellow Jeopardy! champs Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer are getting paid for their roles as Chasers. 

Ken's exact salary on The Chase has not been disclosed. If it works anything like the British version of the show that it's adapted from, though, the experts, or Chasers, don't earn any additional money if they beat the contestant. That would suggest that whatever Ken is making on the show, it's a relatively flat salary that isn't impacted by his performance. Still, it seems like Ken is working hard to beat his opponents. 

Much like Ken, Brad's exact salary on 'The Chase' is unknown, and also like Ken, Brad has enough winnings from other game shows that it probably doesn't matter that much. Across his appearances on Jeopardy!, Brad has pulled in more than $4.6 million in winnings, and before the championship tournament in which he lost to Ken Jennings, he had never lost on the show to a human opponent. 

James' Chase salary is also unknown, but his skill at trivia has made him a formidable Chaser on the show. James is the only American Chaser who was also a contestant on the British version of the show, and his ability to use his speed and knowledge to win massive amounts of money on Jeopardy! has served him well in his role on The Chase.

Unlike a show like Jeopardy!, Ken, Brad and James are not competing against one another when they appear on The Chase. Instead, they're competing against other contestants who are trying to prove that they can outsmart a quiz show genius known as the Chaser. The show consists of two rounds in which the contestants compete against the Chaser. 

In the first round, known as the "cash builder" round, contestants compete individually and must answer as many questions as they can in 60 seconds. In order to survive that round, they have to stay ahead of the Chaser on the game board. All of the contestants who survive that first round are then moved on to the Final Chase, where they can work together as a team to beat the Chaser to win an equal share of the accumulated prize money. 

If the Chaser prevails, the contestants walk away with nothing. As a result, the game show's producers likely hope that the Chasers will emerge victorious, as it allows them to hang on to more money. Although the British Chasers don't receive a bonus for beating the contestants, it's unclear whether that's also true for ABC's version.